Tuesday, November 5

Tag: chatbot

Facebook Acquires Chatbot Startup Kustomer
ACQUISITION

Facebook Acquires Chatbot Startup Kustomer

Social media platform Facebook acquire Kustomer, a customer service chatbot for an undisclosed sum. But according to The Wall Street Journal sources the deal has valued the company around $1 billion. Kustomer is an omnichannel CRM platform that brings customer conversations from various channels together into a single-screen view. It helps businesses automate repetitive tasks so their agents can maximize the time and quality of interactions with customers. Facebook plans to use Kustomer’s bot in its Whatsapp and messenger service to scale the client's businesses and innovate its product offering via automation. Facebook in its press release said, "We’ve witnessed this shift firsthand as every day more than 175 million people contact businesses via WhatsApp. This number is growing ...
Netcore Acquires Quinto.ai an AI Chatbot Start-up
ACQUISITION

Netcore Acquires Quinto.ai an AI Chatbot Start-up

MNetcore Solutions, a Global Marketing technology company, has acquired Quinto.ai, an AI chatbot start-up. With the IP and talent acquisition, Netcore gets access to Quinto's conversational AI-powered chatbot engine and its employees. Quinto’s co-founder Hrishikesh Rajpathak also joins Netcore as Chief Data Scientist and will lead its Machine Learning and Conversation Analytics initiatives. Hrishikesh comes with over 12 years of experience in Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. Founded 4 years back, Quinto is a food recommendation platform which later pivoted to a conversational AI platform. Quinto enables businesses to automate conversations with customers and improve customer experience. Businesses across verticals can use Q...
Pharma Major Lupin Launches its First Chatbot named ANYA
Tech

Pharma Major Lupin Launches its First Chatbot named ANYA

A medtech firm Lupin has reportedly roled out a chatbot named ‘ANYA’ which has been basically designed to provide medically verified information for health-related queries. This particular disease awareness bot aims to answer patient queries related to ailments. The bot was launched at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Research Society for the Study of Diabetes. ANYA is chatbot trained to help patients with health-related concerns as part of their disease management. “At Lupin, we continue to explore ways to integrate technology to support effective patient care. Chatbot as a technology has enormous potential to aid in medical assistance and to support in building awareness and breaking myths associated with various therapies,” said Rajeev Sibal, President - IRF, Lupin. ANYA is currently...
Vernacular Chatbot Platform Raises Seed Funding From IIM-Ahmedabad
FUNDING

Vernacular Chatbot Platform Raises Seed Funding From IIM-Ahmedabad

DheeYantra Research Labs, the company behind vernacular chatbot platform dhee.ai, recently raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a seed round led by Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), the incubator-cum-investment arm of IIM-Ahmedabad. This funding round also witnessed the participation of Gopal Krishna, former managing director of Maxim India Integrated Circuits and stock market mogul Vijay Kedia. The funds raised will serve to strengthen the firm’s sales and marketing units while also investing on additional features such as improving support in additional languages for the Indian and overseas markets. DheeYantra was founded in 2017 by Vidhu Beenie and Sreekumar Jairaj and provides voice and text-based platform dhee.ai, which is supported by their fla...
Amazon Rolls Out Chatbot
News

Amazon Rolls Out Chatbot

Amazon.com Inc's chief technology officer is working toward a day when people can control almost any piece of software with their voice. The company on Wednesday rolled out the technology powering Alexa, its voice assistant that competes with Apple Inc's Siri, to developers so they can build chat features into their own apps, CTO Werner Vogels said in an interview. The service, Amazon Lex, was in a preview phase since late 2016. The move underscores how Amazon is racing to be the top player in voice-controlled computing, after losing out in mobile to Apple and Alphabet Inc's Google. Vogels said that Amazon's headway in processing how humans write and speak would make conversational assistants or "chatbots" more helpful than the clunky tools they've been in the past. "There's...
HDFC Bank Launches Chatbot Eva For Customer Services
News

HDFC Bank Launches Chatbot Eva For Customer Services

HDFC Bank announced the launch of an electronic virtual assistant (EVA), an artificial intelligence-driven chatbot, for customer services. Eva is India's first AI-based banking chatbot and can answer millions of customer queries across multiple channels instantly, HDFC Bank said in a statement. Eva can assimilate knowledge from thousands of sources and provide answers in simple language in less than 0.4 seconds, it said. "Within the first few days of its launch, Eva has answered over 1 lakh queries from thousands of customers from 17 countries across the globe," it claimed. With the launch of Eva, it said, bank's customers can get information on its products and services instantaneously and it also becomes smarter as it learns through its customer interactions. Going forward, E...
India is Primed for the ChatBot Revolution
BLOGS

India is Primed for the ChatBot Revolution

On my way to work in Bangalore last week (I’m an intern at a chatbot company), I was listening to Radio One, an Indian radio station, when I heard an ad for a competition. At first, I didn’t think much of it. Phone-in radio shows are nothing new in India. But then the radio show host said something curious: “WhatsApp us your messages at…”. I realized that, in India, WhatsApp isn’t a feature or an app like Uber or Swiggy but rather a basic utility like Internet or cell reception.   While those in the Western world were first exposed to the Internet through web pages on the desktop, Indians came online through WhatsApp. Today, if you want to stay in touch with your family and friends, you need WhatsApp. The phrase “WhatsApp me” has replaced the phrase “call me” or “message...
Legal Platform LawRato Launches LawBot, India’s First Legal Advice Chatbot
News

Legal Platform LawRato Launches LawBot, India’s First Legal Advice Chatbot

LawRato, India's leading lawyer search and legal advice platform, launched the country's first self-help Facebook Messenger chatbot today nicknamed 'LawBot', the chatbot that lets users search for legal answers, ask a free legal question and find the best lawyer for their legal requirement. Users can also book a consultation with the lawyer recommended by the bot by paying a nominal consultation fee. The bot can be accessed through https://m.me/lawrato/ or by sending a message at LawRato's Facebook page. Available across India, LawBot allows users to enter their legal problem in the form of a question and throws up the most relevant answers and recommended lawyers for the particular problem using an AI algorithm developed in-house at LawRato.com. The users can then either continue by ...
After Linkedin, Microsoft Acquires Messaging Start-up Founded By Indian
ACQUISITION

After Linkedin, Microsoft Acquires Messaging Start-up Founded By Indian

Technology giant Microsoft has acquired a messaging-app developer founded by an Indian, as the US-based software firm aims to strengthen its position in the emerging era of combining the power of human language with advanced machine intelligence. Microsoft acquired California-based Wand Labs, a start-up which builds messaging technology for apps, founded in 2013 by IIT-Delhi alumnus Vishal Sharma who was previously the vice president, products at Google. The terms of the acquisition were not made public. "This acquisition accelerates our vision and strategy for Conversation as a Platform which (India-born CEO of Microsoft) Satya Nadella introduced at our Build 2016 conference," Corporate Vice President, Information Platform Group at Microsoft David Ku said in a statement yesterday. Dur...
Ratan Tata Invest in An Artificial Intelligence Based Chatbot Niki.ai
FUNDING

Ratan Tata Invest in An Artificial Intelligence Based Chatbot Niki.ai

Leading industrialist Ratan Tata has invested in niki.ai , an artificial intelligence (AI) based chatbot . The company has also received funding from existing investor Ronnie Screwvala-led Unilazer, it said in a statement. It, however, did not disclose the details of the funding or the total amount it has raised till date. The Tata Sons Chairman Emeritus has made more than 25 investments in startups in the last two years, including online marketplace Snapdeal , digital wallet provider Paytm , cab hailing service Ola, data analytics company Tracxn Technologies, online pet supplies store Dogspot.in and online lingerie store Zivame. Last year, Tata had invested in Infinite Analytics, an artificial intelligence-based predictive analytics startup. Founded in April 2015 by IIT Kha...